The invention herein described was made in the course of a contract with the United States Air Force. The present invention relates to multiple-sensor airborne reconnaissance systems, and more particularly, to a novel and rapid means for correlating the discrete products of the sensors and determining their geographic locations. The "sensors" are any of cameras, magnetic recording devices, a radar set, or other type of detector, all capable of simultaneous operation in the same system.
In conventional photo-reconnaissance systems where camera photos of the ground are taken from an aircraft flying along an area of interest, for example, the photo interpreter on the ground after the flight requires many hours to positively establish the location of the first picture or frame, and many additional hours for each following frame in succession, one by one. Where many photos are taken, especially from a plurality of cameras or other types of sensors, this large amount of time consumed is obviously unsatisfactory. The problem is that there seems to be no system or method using a common basic reference for correlation of the sensor events or outputs as they occur, and no fast accurate method of obtaining corresponding location or other data for the sensor products after they have been developed or processed, on the ground.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a sensor correlation system wherein, as soon as the collected and recorded data is available for inspection, any one selected photo frame or sensor product of interest can be immediately checked in a single simple step to determine its precise geographic location. Conversely, it is another object of this invention to provide a sensor correlation system wherein it can be determined, by a single simple scanning of a list, which sensor products (if any) cover any desired geographic locations of interest. In other words, the exact sensor product(s) for those locations can be identified and then picked out from all the collected data for examination.
A further object is to provide a sensor correlation system wherein no time-consuming step-by-step procedure for each individual successive information frame beginning with the first one taken, is required.